More Guns Less Crime by John Jr (ebook reader macos .txt) 📗

Of the active permit holders, .16 percent had their permits revoked or suspended for any reason during 1998."

North Carolina. Of the permits issued between December 1, 1995, and August 4, 1999, .3 percent were revoked for any reason. While no detailed records exist for what reasons prompted revocations, those who oversaw the collection of the statistics could not recall hearing of any case of improperly firing a gun. 100

Oklahoma. Of the permits issued from 1996 to August 1999, .1 percent were revoked for any reason. 101 Even these small numbers exaggerate the risks posed by permit holders, for some of these permit holders had their licenses "revoked" simply because they died. The Oklahoma Supreme

Court also recently ruled that the state had improperly revoked some permits for reasons unrelated to one's fitness to carry a concealed handgun.

South Carolina. Of the permits issued from July 1996 to August 16, 1999, .4 percent were revoked for any reason. No violations involved a permit holder firing a gun. Sometimes the reason for the revocation was relatively trivial. For instance, one person lost his permit for not keeping his gun properly hidden—he was not wearing a shirt so the gun could be seen extending above his pants' waistband.

Utah. Of the permits issued between the summer of 1994 and July 1999, .4 percent were revoked for any reason. Of these revocations, 80 percent resulted from drunk driving. No violations involved the firing of a gun by a permit holder in Utah. 102

Wyoming. Of the permits issued during fall 1994 to July 1999, .2 percent were revoked for any reason. James M. Wilson, the supervisor for the permitting program, stated that "Revocations did not include any cases of discharging of a firearm." 103

9Are the CBS and Voter News Service polls accurately reflecting how gun ownership rates vary across states?

Douglas Weil: But the most important information is that the Voter News Service, which conducted the 1996 poll has said the poll cannot be used in the manner Dr. Lott used it. It cannot be used to say anything about gun ownership in any state, and it cannot be used to compare gun ownership to the earlier 1988 voter poll. ("More Guns, Less Crime? A Debate between John Lott, Author of More Guns, Less Crime, and Douglas Weil, Research Director of Handgun Control, Inc.," an on-line debate sponsored by Time magazine, transcript from July 1, 1998)

Statistics from the CBS and Voter News Service exit polls (discussed in chapters 3 and 5) were originally "weighted" by these organizations to reflect the share of different racial, sex, and age groups in the national population. For example, white females between thirty and thirty-nine make up 6 percent of the population but may end up accounting for a larger percentage of those surveyed in a poll. If white females in that age group are overrepresented in the calculations made to determine what voters support, the poll will not accurately reflect how voters as a whole will vote in an election. To correct this, polls were adjusted so that different groups are weighted according to their actual shares of either the voting or the general population. It is therefore necessary for the researcher to use a state's demographics to adjust that state's poll results

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himself, because the shares that different groups make of state populations differ from their shares of the national population. That is precisely what I did.

There were also differences in how the 1988 and 1996 surveys were phrased, and I already discussed those biases right at the beginning of chapter 3. In the notes accompanying that discussion, I mentioned that these biases do not appreciably affect changes in survey results between these two years. The important point is that the changes in how the questions were worded should not alter the relative ranking of states or what types of people are more likely to own guns. Regressions using data from the two years used variables that account for the average difference across years as well as the average differences across states to account for any biases.

10 Have I ignored the costs of gun violence?

He ignores the huge cost on medical systems that gun violence causes. (Steve Young of the Bell Campaign, an anti-gun group, as quoted in Frank Main, "Economist Says Guns Fight Crime," Chicago Sun-Times, July 8, 1999, p. 6)

The costs of crime include medical or other costs of crime like lost time from a job or replacement costs for damage and replacement costs for items taken or destroyed. I do not ignore such costs. But unlike my critics, neither do I ignore the crimes that are stopped because people are able to defend themselves. The net effect is what is relevant, and that is directly measured by what happens to the number of crimes. To the extent that people commit crimes with permitted concealed handguns, the number of crimes will rise. To the extent that such handguns deter criminals, the number of crimes will decline. When criminals substitute different types of crimes, the issue then is how the medical and other costs of those different crimes compare. As to the costs of different crimes, I relied on a study produced the National Institute of Justice, rather than produce my own independent numbers.

An interesting contrast to my work is a recent paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which claimed to show that there were "$2.3 billion in lifetime medical costs for people shot in 1994." Jens Ludwig, one of the authors of the study, argues that "cities such as Chicago could use the study in their lawsuits against the gun industry." 104 But the correct question is not whether guns involve medical costs but whether total medical costs are greater with or without guns. The logic is akin to determining whether police